Thursday, February 23, 2017

Disappointed by all of the recommended exhibitions in the
Marais galleries, I dropped into Karsten Greve’s storefront space on my way
home to see Yuri Dojc’s powerful selection of photographs for Last Folio. Again and again, stories of
the displaced, decimated European Jews continue to call out to us. Today, it is
not only about remembering the devastation of the Holocaust, an exhibition like
Last Folio is a reminder of what
people endure, and what they leave behind when the set out to another life.
Whether that be fleeing Nazi persecution and promise of annihilation in
Slovakia in 1942, or being transported to their deaths in Poland, we cannot
even begin to imagine what these people went through. And neither can we
imagine the struggle to begin all over again in another land. And that’s why,
the story must be told again and again, and again. Yuri Dojc tells these
stories from an as yet unexplored perspective.

Yuri Docj, Synagogue (Bardejov), 2007

Dojc’s photographs function on so many levels. The images
are introduced as the result of a journey he took through Czechoslovakia following
a chance encounter at his father’s funeral with a woman who turned out to be a
Holocaust survivor. And so, the photographs we see document a personal journey
through his own private past, a journey that leads to a library in which he
finds a book belonging to his deceased grandfather. The discovery of this book gives
the journey another level, because in the book Dojc finds his own story, his
own history as second generation refugee.

Yuri Dojc, Fragment of a Torah Scroll, 2015

The photographs also tell the story of a lost culture, a
culture that is ours as well as those who identify the language falling of the
pages of these decaying books in the photographs as theirs. The culture of
books that no longer exists in this world of technology and tweets, a world in
which reading of physical objects is becoming a thing of the past, we are
reminded that the journey is also ours. It is our history as much as that of
Jewish life and culture that flies off these pages and disintegrates on these photographed
shelves. Many of the books in the photographs are closed, and have obviously
been closed for many many years. Inside them are secrets we shall never know,
the past that was never passed on because the Nazis decided to brand a whole
people on the basis of their irrational fears. It’s true that Docj discovers
this history, by chance, on his travels, but the secrets inside the books will
never be told. And so it is the history of the books, and the stories of those
who owned the books that are also sequestered within these tightly closed pages,
between disintegrating covers.

Yuri Dojc, Library Shelf (Bardejov), 2007

What we see here in Dojc’s images are books. Books that know
the difference between life and death, books that speak of absence and the
tragedy of human violence, books that remind of what we want to forget, books
creating memories that we never had. Books here are held over our heads, they offer
a reason to live and to know and to learn. And in their fragility, we can look
at the books and feel their fragile material disintegrating between our fingers
as we turn the page, even though they can never be touched. Books are
landscape, memory, emotional beings, burnt in extreme close up in these vivid
photographs. In Docj’s photographs books breath a life into what has never
fully died, and they express complex emotions, our emotions, that we feel when
we are reminded of those who live inside of them. It’s as though Docj gives
these emotions to the viewers of his photographs. And then, at the very same
time, just as we think we have understood the story, in Docj’s photographs
books become abstract: it is as though abstraction is the only way that their
histories that don’t fully make could ever be told.

Yuri Docj, Tefillin Scroll (Bardejov), 2007

In one of the most moving images in the exhibition, we see
the documentation of his final stop on his journey around Slovakia with Mrs Vajnorska,
the Auschwitz survivor he met at his father’s funeral. In the small town of Bardejov, Dojc
discovered a schoolroom, synagogue, and a cemetery, abandoned. In a room layered
with dust and decay, everything is still in its place. It was as though the
school children had run out of the classroom at the sound of the bell, grabbed
their bags and never returned. This was of course, what happened at the end of
this devastating tale.

Friday, February 17, 2017

As I wandered around the San Pietro in Vincoli, one of the
few churches built by Michelangelo’s benefactor, Pope Julius II, I wondered
what the great Renaissance artist would have thought of the current leaders of
the free world. Julius was, afterall, a man to inspire fear and rage in all in
his midst. And Julius was obsessed with his own self-importance, making most
decisions based on the benefits to his ego. A pope who took more than his name from
Julius Ceasar could not have been an easy man to work for. But Julius was also
a benefactor of the arts. Whether his investments were motivated by an appreciation
of culture or an assuredness in the longevity of his own legacy, it seems of
little importance today. Irrespective of wrath, his unethical behavior, financial
greed and megalomania, at least Julius gave us some extraordinary works of art.

Julius II

For me, Michelangelo’s Moses
who sits at the centre of a very reduced version of what was to be Julius’ tomb
in the Basilica San Pietro in Vincoli, is one of the great wonders of the
western world. Like most great artistic treasures on display in Rome, Moses sits
safely behind barriers, in the artificial illumination produced by a tourist euro
in the meter. At the end of the day, when the tourists are gone home, and the
light comes through the window above and behind him, Moses takes on a steely
grey clarity, that has his skin sing in the late afternoon sun for which he was
made. Julius lies above him, propped up on an elbow. Even though his figure is
somewhat contemplative, it’s as though he had a sudden thought and raised
himself up from the dead to deliver one final order. Of course, Michelangelo
found him inside the marble alive. As was the custom, in death the pope is
given eternal life and salvation on his tomb.

A reproduction ofDomenico Zampieri's The Liberation of St Peter, which was destroyed in 1944

However we interpret the image of Julius, it’s Moses beneath him that captures every
aspect of our beings. Moses is perfect. Many before me have said this, but it’s
true. Standing before him it’s impossible not to be seduced by his beard, the
extraordinary detail and clarity of his robes, his arms, and the veins on his arms.
This is no ordinary sculpture. Made with the same sweeping beauty as the
prophets on the Sistine ceiling, the power of David and the tenderness of the Madonna in the Basilica San Pietro,
Moses is heavenly and sensual in the
same breath. I know everyone says this, but being with Moses in the flesh, it
was as though I was the first to wonder that this perfect being could have emerged
from a single rough piece of marble.

Angel of Death

Others have claimed that Moses
is a self-portrait, the great artist imbued with heavenly perfection in
marble. This claim has been dismissed as often as it is asserted. However, it’s
true that Michelangelo’s famous figures always reflect the age that he was when
he made them. Certainly, Moses could
easily be around 40 years, Michelangelo’s age when he came back to Rome to
finish the tomb. Given his own self-aggrandizement, and the placement of Moses emanating and reflecting the light
of God in the centre of Julius II’s tomb, Michelangelo wouldn’t appear to acquiesce
to the Pope’s rule. That is, if we read these details of the tomb as saying
anything about the relationship between the ruler and the ruled. And so, while Julius
might be protesting his placement on the tier above in relatively diminished
form, Michelangelo’s creation lives on as a force in the imagination long after
the one who had authority over the land.

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About Me

FxReflects on art and visual culture in Paris, and other great cities, with occasional forays into literature and cultural opinion. There's no consistent logic or reason to the entries, but there is one criteria: everything I discuss has to inspire me!